1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an initialization technique of a recording medium for recording data.
2. Description of Related Art
The enlargement of the capacity of a detachable recoding medium such as a memory card used for a digital camera and the like has been progressing. It can be considered that a situation in which not all of the recording capacity of a memory card can be used by the format of File Allocation Table (FAT) 12 or FAT 16, which are generally used now, is brought about. However, in case of performing the formatting using a system capable of dealing with a large capacity such as FAT 32 to deal with the whole recording capacity of a recoding medium, it is considerable that such a format cannot be used by an existing digital camera.
Accordingly, the methods enabling the use of the whole recording capacity of a recoding medium while ensuring the compatibility with the existing digital camera have been examined. As one of them, there is a method in which one medium is divided into a plurality of partitions and each partition is formatted into a format different from one another, as generally performed to a hard disk built in a personal computer or the like. For example, the leading partition is formatted by FAT 12 or FAT 16, which can be recognized by the existing digital camera, and the other partitions are formatted by a file system capable of dealing with a large capacity like FAT 32.
However, a problem is caused in the case where a detachable recording medium is divided into a plurality of partitions to produce a plurality of types of formats in a mixed state. That is, when a general user initializes a recording medium, a situation is expected in which it takes some time for the user to designate the recording capacity and the formatting type of each partition and operations become more complicated in comparison with those of a conventional simple initialization method.